Soldiers and the media. A most unlikely marriage.
By Miguel Guanipa (06/03/06)
Imagine that you make a choice to enlist in the army. You have a profound sense of commitment to the cause of freedom, and as a patriotic American who deeply loves his country you rightfully see enrollment in the armed forces as one of the loftiest venues through which you can fulfill your calling.
Once your basic training is over you are sent to a country were a vicious war is being waged.
Every morning you wake up faced with the unenviable task of fighting an invisible enemy. This enemy is also ruthless and cares little that innocent victims are slaughtered as he seeks to destroy you and your comrades. Yet you have made up your mind that you will comply with the rules of engagement which decree that you conduct your service in a civilized manner. But that is the least of your concerns, for no matter how hard you try, you find a media that is utterly opposed to your efforts and insatiable in its thirst for seeking out mistakes made by you or your fellow soldiers as fodder for their front pages.
This is but a taste of what the vast majority of soldiers who are currently fighting in Iraq are facing. But you wouldn’t know this by what is constantly being reported in the mainstream media. The truth is that incidents of soldiers behaving in a morally irresponsible manner are so few and far between, they are virtually negligible.
If one was to draw conclusions about how American armed forces are performing in Iraq by what the media feeds us day in and day out, it would seems as if innocent civilians are being tortured, maimed or needlessly slaughtered daily by an occupying force of barbarians.
When you consider that there is virtually no good news stories being reported, there are only two conclusions that can be drawn: either there are no stories of heroism, bravery or compassion on the part of the soldiers stationed there to be reported and the media is simply focusing their efforts on impartially covering the facts, or the media is ignoring any news that contradict their ideological stance on the war.
Given the thousands of troops which are currently stationed there, I find it hard to believe that the mainstream media are having a hard time finding any good news coming out of Iraq, after three years and only two or three “scandals” such as the Abu Graib story and the recent allegations of atrocities in Haditha where only a few troops were involved, and they have already passed a guilty verdict against the alleged culprits before all of the facts are examined.
I believe the reason for this is because the media views the entire war effort through an ideological prism which they have committed themselves to from the very beginning. If you doubt this you will find it hard to explain why there are no news to report other than how many civilians, police, or marines get shot or blown up each month rather than how many lives were spared as a direct result of the daily efforts on the troops on the ground, or how many explosives were detonated without harming any innocent civilians, how many confrontations between enemy forces and Iraqi police took place with few or no casualties, or how many decisions the newly formed cabinet of the Iraqi government tackled on any particular day.
The reporting of these events with the same frequency the bad news are reported would not lend any credibility to the mainstream media’s notion that this is a wrong war, American soldiers are caught in a quagmire, and Iraqi civilians are resentful of the fact that they are being bullied by a hostile occupying force, and they rather go back to being governed by their old lovable dictator Saddam Hussein, who at least put food on their tables and kept the trains running on time. At the same time, any reports of positive developments would suggest that those who are adamantly opposed to the war may be sorely misguided.
I recognize how naive it would be to hope that the media will someday wake up and abandon their highly prejudiced devotion to the carnage delivered at their front steps by those whom they continue to sympathetically laud as insurgents. Should things not go according to their calculations, they may miss a chance to see the re-birth of a nation whose people refused to quell their yearning for freedom in the face of what appeared to be insurmountable odds.
But this is a kind of predicament that is all too familiar. In every war there are always those who have sought to undermine the cause of freedom both at home and abroad, while the American soldier has remained steadfast in his or her commitment.
In these times when our soldiers find so few friends among the mainstream media, I am reminded of an 1863 quote from the Patriot and Union Newspaper, which had aligned itself with many of their peers in their fierce opposition to the civil war, and ran an editorial criticizing Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address which read: “We pass over the silly remarks of the president; for the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall no more be repeated or thought of.”
It is in our age that we realize how wrong the naysayers of that day were, and after all this comes to pass, a day will come when those who condemn the war in Iraq as a futile endeavor will be ultimately proven wrong. I only hope for the sake of our children’s freedom that our soldiers are never discouraged or deterred from their mission by these talking heads and their pointless ramblings.
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